Thursday, March 24, 2016

You've undoubtedly heard by now about Trump criticizing Heidi Cruz's looks and Ted calling him a sniveling coward in return. If you haven't, you can read about it here. My God.

In light of all that, this article by Franklin Foer about Trump's one true philosophy of life, misogyny, is a must read. It points out that for all of Trump's inconsistencies throughout time, the one thing's that's never changed is his primitive view of women. The stories of his mistreatment, crude comments and simple dominance have been part of his legend for decades. It seems to be one of the things people like most about him.

I urge you to read the whole thing. I'm sure there are episodes you haven't heard about. I've read a lot about Trump but I'd never heard some of these stories. It covers all the various ways in which Trump's alpha male persona is formed by misogyny and male competitiveness.

As Foer writes:

Trump wants us to know all about his sex life. He doesn’t regard sex as a private activity. It’s something he broadcasts to demonstrate his dominance, of both women and men. In his view, treating women like meat is a necessary precondition for winning, and winning is all that matters in his world. By winning, Trump means asserting superiority. And since life is a zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s expense.

That made me think of this 2011 video we've all seen more than a few times:

When I first saw that I assumed Trump was under the impression that Kelly was quite "fond" of him. The flirty look on his face said he found her very fetching and he let her know it. He thought they had "a thing." When she criticized him later he took it as a betrayal and lashed out like a spurned lover. Now he stalks her like an angry ex-husband.

And then there's this other side:

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,” he told Mika Brzezinski. (Further evidence of his dim view of working moms: Trump once notoriously blurted that the pumping of breast milk in the office is “disgusting.”)

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it. While he celebrates his own sexuality, he believes that female sexuality has spun out of control and needs to be contained. The best example of this view is a reality show called Lady or a Tramp, which Trump developed for Fox but never aired. The premise of the show was that Trump would take “girls in love with the party life” and send them off for a “stern course” on manners. “We are all sick and tired of the glamorization of these out-of-control young women,” he told Variety, “so I have taken it upon myself to do something about it.”